A Fairy Tale Castle

Berkeley Springs Castle

Built of local sandstone, the castle was a gift from Colonel Taylor Suit to his young wife Rosa. He only lived a year in it. Photos (except for one, noted) by Steve Shaluta, courtesy Travel Berkeley Springs.

Berkeley Springs Castle

Built of local sandstone, the castle was a gift from Colonel Taylor Suit to his young wife Rosa. He only lived a year in it. Photos (except for one, noted) by Steve Shaluta, courtesy Travel Berkeley Springs.

Game Room

Living in a historic home exacts a price beyond the cost of the structure. There is all that history – and the ghosts of owners past – demanding to be heard, respected and occasionally lived with. Fortunately for Berkeley Castle, its newest owner measures up to the task.

Rosa Suit, the young Victorian beauty for whom Berkeley Castle was built, would have approved of Andrew Gosline, not the least because he keeps her portrait hanging in his private suite.

In 2002, “I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about a castle for sale in West Virginia,” says Gosline, a former New Jersey businessman. “I was surprised. A castle in West Virginia? I came to Berkeley Springs, a place I’d never heard of, to see it.”

A month later, Gosline returned for the auction with his two grown sons. He never planned to buy, but got caught up in the bidding. “My oldest son turned to me and said ‘Dad, I think you just bought a castle.’”

In the five years since, Gosline has spent more money putting his castle in order and adding suitable acreage than he did buying it.

“There had been daily museum tours for almost 50 years,” says Gosline. “I needed to make it more livable as a home.” The effort accelerated last year when Gosline married Gabriela George and brought her to live there, with their young son Mark and her teenage daughter Rebecca.

Colonel Samuel Taylor Suit of Maryland began “laying the foundation of his cottage” in 1885 according to the local newspaper of the time. Two years earlier, Suit had married Rosa Pelham, daughter of an Alabama congressman and 30 years his junior. Work progressed on what the paper called “one of the finest residences in the state,” and it was occupied by Suit, Rosa and their three young children in August 1887.

The “cottage” was one of more than two dozen splendid structures in the chic “cottage” community of Berkeley Springs. By September 1888, after a brief illness, Suit was dead. Rosa spent the next decade hosting elaborate parties in the place that was never again known as anything but a castle.

More than a century later, new owner Gosline began his restoration with the exterior.

“There was a tremendous amount of stonework to be done,” he says. Decades of haphazard uses for the castle – from tea room and artist retreat to site of the Monte Vista Boys Camp – resulted in a hodge podge of patching on the stone walls. Century-old mortar was replaced. Two terraces were added on both the north and south sides of the second floor – the one on the north holds a hot tub. Gosline expanded the gardens, adding an outside waterfall and his trademark touch – stone gargoyles posed among the crenelated battlements.

“I have enough work planned to keep stone contractor Dino Pretruci busy for years,” he says. One of the biggest jobs was putting on a new roof, which was uneven, inadequately drained and covered in accumulated layers of tar paper.

"Years of sitting water had damaged the beams,” says Gosline. “We had to do extensive repair and replacement before we rubberized the roof.”

On the inside, Gosline did little structural work on the first floor, which has a great hall with matching fireplaces and majestic stairway. The turret’s circular room is decorated with a chess table and chairs and a yin/yang symbol painted on the ceiling by Chinese artist Shaun Wang, who lives in Berkeley Springs.

The path to the legendary dungeon is through the first floor catering kitchen and pantry. Stairs curve down an opening made by blasting through the rough, natural rock of the mountainside which makes up the exterior wall of the space. The winding tunnels were a favorite stop on local ghost tours that operated in the Castle during the mid-1990s.

“There were always stories about secret tunnels and dungeons,” says Beth Curtin, a chamber of commerce official. “Walter Bird owned the Castle from 1954 to 2000. He ran the house tours and would occasionally embroider the truth.

“He claimed there was a tunnel from the Castle to the Potomac River – an impossible six miles away.”

More accurately, there was a tunnel from the Castle basement to the tower-shaped carriage house built by Rosa in 1893. When W.Va. 9 was built in the 1920s, cutting the tower off from the main structure, the tunnel under the road collapsed.

On the second floor, the elegantly wood-paneled library has been transformed into a game room with an antique pool table. The halls are filled with floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets built by local craftsman Phil Tate to compensate for the lack of closets.

Additional wood restoration was done by specialists from Winchester, Va.: “They spent several months in the game room alone,” says Gosline.

In the late 1930s, an addition was built to the back of the castle that includes today’s third floor. This is the family section of the house – a large room filled with comfortable couches, chairs and a big screen television. Rebecca’s bedroom and the everyday kitchen are also on this floor.

“It means a lot of stairs and yelling to get attention,” says Rebecca, who has a classroom on the second floor where she is homeschooled. There are eight fireplaces, 16 rooms, nine full bathrooms and three halves, as well as a kitchen on every floor.

Although forced to add ornate metal gates to keep out over-enthusiastic tourists, many of whom remember touring the Castle as children, he occasionally rents it for weddings, photo shoots and gatherings.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Castle has long been rumored to house spirits. Gosline recently entertained a group of ghost hunters who claimed to have documented electromagnetic changes and captured infrared images of entities.

"Rosa’s never joined me in the suite,” says Gosline, drawing his own conclusions.